frevvo 6 – Workflow Escalations (part 1)

This article is the first in a series about the workflow escalations feature included with version 6.1 of the frevvo platform.

Notifications

Workflows in frevvo are a simple solution for automating business processes that require multiple steps performed by different people. A common example would be an expense report that is be filled out by an employee (step 1), routed to the employee’s manager for approval and signature (step 2), and finally to the accounting department for processing (step 3). When all the responsible parties are available and diligently watching their “inboxes”, everything flows smoothly. However, at times a workflow could be held up at a given step for various reasons. In this example, the manager could be out sick or the accounting department is overwhelmed with other requests and doesn’t have bandwidth to monitor their inboxes. With the latest release of frevvo, the workflow designer has a new set of tools to help deal with these scenarios.

Workflow designers can define escalations for any step of the flow. Escalations are a set of deadlines that consist of 2 components: a condition and a set of actions to take if the condition is met. Let’s take the expense report example and assume that the accounting department must process expense reports within 7 days from the time the manager approves it. With frevvo escalations, a work flow can be created that will notify the accounting department when they have missed this deadline.

Below is an image of the expense report process in the frevvo workflow designer:

Users can configure escalation behavior by selecting a step and clicking Setup Escalations. In this case the Accounting step is configured to show up in the task list for anyone with the Accounting role. The screenshot below shows how an escalation can be set up to notify these “potential owners” when the task has not be completed within 7 days:

If the accounting step is not complete within 7 days, an email will be sent to all the users with the accounting role. Note that the subject and message use templatized strings (e.g. {flow.activity.escalation.duedate}) to provide context for each workflow (or expense report in this case).

You can set up as many escalations as you want. For example, let’s say John Smith manages the accounting role and needs to know if 8 days passes:

The first deadline is collapsed and hidden but a second one for Mr. Smith has been added.

This has been an example of triggering notifications in frevvo workflows. In the upcoming articles, reassignment and reminders will be discussed. To learn more about the escalations feature, please check out our user documentation.